Your world may be strange to you, but you are entirely native to experience and hence intimate with all things.

Imagine consciousness as space. But the space is full of stuff, larvae which are no different in themselves than the space that contains them. As space consciousness is isotropic and is neither filled not empty; that depends on how it arranges its illumination, its mirroring, attention being only one way among others. Dreamless sleep is the most consistent, dream another, a completely different mode of self-appearing. Every creature that lives by attention needs to sleep; attention is a violent exploitation of consciousness, a cruel way of exploiting it. All of the violence of millions of years of evolution is contained in it. Subject and object are consequences of attention, and the belief that they are fundamentally different, and that subject is better. You imagine consciousness as a landscape of phenomenality, but it is made of the same stuff that extrudes a subject, if squeezed in the right way.

Attention is a break in the symmetry of consciousness, it gives rise to the metric which structures your world. And yet attention is made up out of nothing but consciousness, it does not exist apart from or arise outside of consciousness. If the nature of attention changes everything else changes too.

Attention is a specialisation within consciousness such could only be of consciousness, but it is not identical with it. Consciousness is space like in that it embraces very many different things, many concurrent and interrelated dynamic contents that recede, layer beyond layer into the distance. There is no sense of a dimensional limitation in this. In relation to it, attention is like a rapidly moving spotlight which focalises now one part of the contents of this space and now another; it takes in ideas and sensations with equal ease and it alchemises strange blends of the two, it also raises metacognition (in us) and temporalises the content that it touches. You could say that consciousness is only weakly in time but that attention fuses time into linear series. Although every life form with any sort of nervous system has both attention and consciousness, plants, perhaps, having consciousness without attention. What is peculiar about the human type of consciousness is that as space it is radically curved, the curvature being felt as a field of force concentrated in certain regions, in certain complexes of content. The sense of self arises from this curvature; it is not any sort of content, but a strong distorting force associated with certain changeable contents. This is merely a descriptive metaphor that arises in consciousness despite the activity of attention, to which such a global view is quite foreign.

What it feels like to be as you are right now, your integrated inner and outer senses, your climate of mind and heart, your cloud of memories and the floating veins of identity-reflections marbling the whole mass, could all of this be quite different and yet it still be you? The answer has to be yes. All of this spatio-temporal experiential meta-stable complex that is your identity is also a content of experience and could change without the 'experiencer' itself changing; the fact that you would not recognise yourself is immaterial - it is a different movie on the same screen. There are plenty of lived-through moments you've entirely forgotten, but they are still yours, and could be recalled by involuntary memory and reclaimed. And if those involuntary memories were imaginary, or rightfully belonged to someone else, you would nonetheless reclaim them with the same joy. All of which is to say that you are not whatever it 'feels like' to be you. Could the same be said about what you call consciousness? If your consciousness were switched to another consciousness, the same movie but on a different screen, would that still be you? This is like the 'uploaded brain' thought experiment. Here the natural answer is no. You are your consciousness in a stronger sense. This is so even though it seems that you only know of there being such a thing as consciousness by way of experiencings, which as already argued are not you. On the other hand, if your consciousness had already changed in the latter sense of being a different screen, you would not know it. It might happen every night during sleep, might be happening at right now, from moment to moment. What then are you?

Not just experiencing but also desiring to alter the experiencing in some way. But the desiring is also an experiencing, so can it just be the experiencing of the desiring to alter experiencing? That is a desiring too, something like the desire to still desire by experiencing desire without desiring (in order) to alter it. It goes around and around at at some point you just fall into it, go to sleep in it, but on the side of the desiring and not the experiencing. Lived experience is made out of that fall. Experiencing is light is awakeness, is presencing, nameless and open, but desire is dark and heavy is dream with its roots deeply embedded in time and in absence and a strange phantasmagoria of images and scenes.

There can not be a deficiency of being, but there can be a felt deficiency of being. This seems to be a misalignment of experiencing which deflects the sense of being out of centre. If you keep trying to regain your seat you as often keep sliding off it. What is constant of the falling, a kind of parallax, a stationary motion. It's impossible to think your way back, it is a disconnection of will and knowing. It reminds you of your helplessness by your being helpless.

Within its terms experience has a terrible consistency. How could there be anything that prevented its least possibilities from fully playing out? Time is invented in order to accommodate them all. Nothing is forgotten. This might be called dependent origination, or co-dependent co-arising. It's what you find yourself in without possibility of escape.

If there were a background to appearance, if phenomenal reality were like little bubble worlds of light popping and bursting in a deep blue night, or were staged by a divine puppeteer in the theatre of an absolute eye, then this background would also be appearance and an infinite regress would follow. Any context of time and space, anything metaphysical, all may be true in some possible world, is appearance. What can be said then about what is actually happening? Only that it is exactly like this and you can't say you don't know.

If the self exists what would it be? There is nothing in the stream of consciousness that can witness identity through time since by its nature it is only made up out of ever-present appearances. There may be a will-to-exist, something immediately felt, but if you were to ask it what of you were essential to it, that were for it like some little household god that it always traveled with, it would answer, 'none at all'; the feeling for being would happily renounce any icon or memory as weightless and beside the point. It is an empty will to will, and again, exists only in the moment. Or there could be some sort of epiphany of time exposing all of a long series of past lives, and future ones, an opening of history, but if this were the case then again it would merge seamlessly into a larger collective history in which any trace of you would be entirely dissolved, and from which ultimately you were free since nothing particular would survive. All ideas of continuity fail to go beyond the moment, even the apparent witnessing of these very moments.

It becomes a project, your project, and the objective plane on which you lay out something of a case a vehicle for a quest, an ambition, a flag to struggle under. It is a struggle against the self, the personal ego as its termed, but carried out by that very self, the objectivity its stalking horse. This is hardly the least obvious thing, but the effort makes it seem like a moral issue and in doing so it assumes the reality of that self as effective spoiler. You can't just turn around and say it's ontological, or aesthetic, and not moral, that it's really a question of just how this self, the author of the project, seems to be, because that too is an ought, a preference on behalf of... what? To do, to do, there would be something to do if the one to do it could only be found.

Eternal flatness and neutral contentment, only the unrelieved horizontal. By dint of a deliberate self-awareness no spontaneous self-awareness can arise. This tired mind could never awaken through some everyday activity like stretching to put a cup back on a shelf. It's the performance of an old instrument and entirely devoid of any charm. This too, a timeless habit, a state of things.

You can think your way to the point of seeing the need for yielding the phenomenal self to a higher power, whatever that might mean, but you can't do it, and should never pretend that you might. Every phenomenological or philosophical approach comes down to a core of Cartesianism, even if that is poeticised beyond recognition. You want to be there to observe every step, even the surrender of self, to be the witness of your own death, writer of your own obituary. For that you would need grace.

Guilt and shame, which may well be the same thing, do not require the other's view of the self, or its proxy, to eventuate but can arise out of the self's internal structure as a falling short in one's own eyes and the concomitant adoption of a defensive posture. Or perhaps the defensive posture comes first and leads to feelings of shame in order to become pragmatically stable. The point is that the burden of sin arises without the presence of a God and the notion of an infringed command. The need for a God arises to explain such feelings in a way that makes it possible to be saved from them. The gaze of the other offers the possibility of being freed from the cycle of shame and defense. You cannot bring this about through your own self love, but you can love another in such a way as to see through their shame. Thus in the sight of a loving father God your sins can be dissolved, if you fulfill certain attainable conditions. This is the opposite of the way it is normally thought of, the other's gaze does not impose guilt and shame but offers the promise of redemption from their wholly endogenous effects.

The mind is as much a product of the world in its self-determined process as any other form of life or aspect of such a form, such as a leaf or a bird's feather. And yet the mind never feels itself to be fully at home in the world, but not necessarily so, only in so far as it arises within certain cultural formations, that is large scale morphologies of mental being, themselves arisen out of natural process. That is always where you are located and where your horizons are determined. If there is a counter-current anywhere in this flowing against the grain and towards an opening to the question of being, this is an exception and hedged around with all the immune responses that the will can muster. The will to identify with any such a current can only be a form of such a response, its subtlety cannot be overestimated and should not be underestimated. The only arms you have are "silence, exile and cunning".

Even if you were to find that all of this were a dream, or just a sliver of some greater reality, there would still be no desire but to enter via your cleansed gateways of perception into the marrow of appearance.

"...what it feels like to be...whatever you are." That's the problem, it feels exactly like what you think you are, but this is only what you appear to be, and this can change in many ways. What you think you are and what you feel like you are are locked in a loop. You don't know what you are; in fact you do know that you don't know what you are but you don't know who it is that doesn't know what you are, or even if 'you' or 'I' is the right word to be using.

The moment you say something you are lost, now speak. Whatever is said it is not you that is speaking. The moment this is thought the truth is with what is left behind, that tremulous life called 'I'. It is indifferent whether it dwells in the midst of the benighted person or in the impersonally polished utterance; the two are counterparts in a dance, lending reality to each other. The light is always where you happen not to be.

If you recall past events what returns are the choices that were made, now to be seen against a more filled-in picture picture of the stakes. The shame that arises from these dubious realisations, dependent on unreliable, on compromised, memory, is entirely of the present; the choice belongs to timeless will as much in play now as at any time. You don't know the particular essence of will that shapes you, you can only bear to know it in brief profiles hedged around with rationalisations and sophisms. The prejudice of the present is that you can escape it by continuing to look forwards, but it is almost a relief to find that you haven't moved one inch from that first awakening of hunger and fear and the sacrifices you offered to old and sinister gods.

The connection between consciousness and being, Dasein and Sein, or Seyn, is both the basis of all philosophy and rather obscure at the same time. For something that is the very basis of evidence it is irritatingly far from self-evident. One way out is that consciousness is not what it is, but rather, at least mostly, a fallen and inauthentic version of itself. It an't quite be that simple since consciousness can only be what it is and so complete in each moment. Its essence must only be somehow concealed from itself, but present in a mysterious identity, as the non-distinction of samsara and nirvana. Consciousness is lost in representation, but representation is only possible because there is presentation, and the faintest hint of difference that still might haunt presentation can only be because of some even more original identity. It is as if you are always living somewhere out in front of yourself, the illusion of which can only be if you are always only where you actually are, right there at yourself.

Consciousness is weakly defined term but perhaps it can be described as 'steerable Dasein'. It doesn't just sit there plonked down in the midst of things like a dumpling, but is directable, shape-shifting, mercurial and not just accidentally but essentially so. Again this is not only a matter of attention, that it does attention, or intention, but that it can be moulded into different shapes without being able to hold on to them more than momentarily. What directs or draws or orients these movements is only itself as well, it is ubiquitous, its own Figaro. Ad with all this, which exhausts just about all of the free play it seems to possess, it has an indelible contact with being, so that one task it might set for itself is to so perfectly imitate being as to dissolve back into it in undreamed of recovery.

The law governed behavior of all phenomena when studied closely enough is evidence of their source outside of time, in other words their conformity to mathematics or the law of sufficient reason is their pedigree in the timeless. However, if you want to continue the no-self line you can just switch it over to 'nothing outside of time'. For example, it is all vast plethora of hyper-microscopic events linked in a vast network and counted off in an absolute time, and by which all we come to know are junior layers of emergent and computable phenomena built on this then you could have the law governed nature of all recognisable phenomena without any corresponding timeless ideality. Downward causation, such as it appears to stabilise what emerges is then a artifact of the computable observer, itself an emergent. Some such final form of Buddhist physics can't be ruled out but the intuition is that its concomitant phenomenalist (or qualia-based) account of consciousness needs to be end-stopped by timelessness.

The question of self or no-self only arises in temporality, it is about an enduring self versus instantaneous partial self-like phenomena or strategic virtual centres or something of that sort. If the source of experience is intemporal, or noumenal, then whether this could be called a self or not is irrelevant; dualistic logic does not apply. So, all that remains of self versus no-self is the relation of these temporally bound centred arisals to the noumenon or source of being. In this case it is clear that taken in themselves no such thing as continuity is possible since they are merely phenomena, but taken in relation to their source they as it were emanate (or not) from the 'same' point as each and every other phenomenon.

To the extent that particular being forms around a notional self this self is not a thing but the general capacity for stories, that is for memory. The limit of the self is the limit of a story that you can tell yourself. These could be, are, many stories and they don't need to add up, only that you appear in relation to them as character or as narrator or just dreamed receiver. There is an outside to this field which is also memory but of a different sort, pure feeling without a subject, the background of embodiment; the first time something was felt, fear, pleasure, fullness, emptiness, before words, before distinctions, before the subject.

The contrast between knowing that and knowing how, or mental knowing and enactive knowing doesn't quite catch the key distinction. Knowing how is too broad a category, perhaps; a spider knows how to weave a web and many other curious things besides that one admires without envying. Better to distinguish what you know by concepts from what you know only musically. The two are mutually untranslatable, but the latter is knowledge in an entirely satisfactory form. No need is felt to translate it in any way. It's also possible that there are forms of knowing that marry the two.